Primary progressive aphasia accompanied by environmental sound agnosia: a neuropsychological, MRI and PET study

As part of the frontotemporal dementias, primary progressive aphasia (PPA) is typically characterized by nonfluent speech with paraphasias, but there is growing evidence that also a fluent variant of PPA exists. We describe a patient suffering from PPA who adds to the broad clinical spectrum of this disorder. Moreover, we report for the first time that PPA may be associated with severe impairment in meaningful nonverbal sound recognition (environmental sound agnosia). These neuropsychological findings were found to be associated with distinct focal alterations in functional and structural neuroimaging.